“Popstar”: A Well-Tuned Satire of Celebrity Self-Indulgence

Soon after seeing Andy Kaufman’s legendary TV special in the summer of 1979, I described it as post-humor—comedy in which laughter is replaced by amazement, in which the incongruities that emerge from utter ordinariness are raised to a cosmic dimension. (Buster Keaton may be its crucial forerunner.) In many respects, “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping”—the work of the Lonely Island trio of Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone (who co-directed, co-wrote, and co-star) and Andy Samberg (who stars and also co-wrote)—is a brightly paced and well-tuned satire on the mechanisms of celebrity. But its best moments share in Kaufman’s modern variety of astonishment, and most of those moments are centered on songs—intentionally bad songs that are in the ballpark with the ingenious ones that Paul Williams composed for Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman to sing in Elaine May’s “Ishtar.”

Those songs are the focal points, the MacGuffins, of the movie, which is a mockumentary about Conner Friel (Andy Samberg), a youngish star who seems to be pushing thirty. He rose to fame in a trio called Style Boyz, along with two lifelong friends, Owen (Taccone) and Lawrence (Schaffer), with whom he made music even as a child. Then Conner struck out to pursue solo stardom, calling himself Conner4real; in the process, he alienated Lawrence, and he now keeps Owen around as a nominal d.j. with no responsibilities, while Conner himself rides wealth and celebrity to ever higher heights of self-indulgence, vanity, complacency, and vapidity.

Just as in “Ishtar” the vagaries of a miserable career, a tawdry political plot, an international incident, and the threat of death do nothing to stifle the protagonists’ dubious but powerful creative urge, so here Conner, for all his luxuriating in the adulation of crowds and the wealth that results, is nonetheless in the grip of artistic desire. Of course, his success breeds the need for success, and his public prominence distorts his creativity and induces him to make songs that reflect back upon him and influence how he’s perceived. The feedback effect of public life turns him into an unintentionally comic monster of transparently mercantile intentions. But the best-laid plans of media ubiquity outlined genially by his publicist (played with puckish precision by Sarah Silverman) run aground and turn catastrophic; he becomes a pariah, a joke, and a failure, and seeks to claw his way back to a favorable spotlight.

The movie is a cornucopia of references and recognitions, a self-circling film in which the winks and nods of names and faces, situations and analogies, anchor the fiction and keep it from floating into pure fantasy. That’s also why it’s almost impossible to discuss in detail: the mere presence of a real-life famous person is no mere performance or plot point but an automatic punch line, so even just listing names would give away some jokes.

On the other hand, the movie teems with so many of them that there’s no harm in a sampling. A wide range of musical luminaries and media figures, including 50 Cent, Ringo Starr, Simon Cowell, Mariah Carey, Usher, DJ Khaled, and A$AP Rocky, pay tribute to Conner (there's also a flash of Paul McCartney and a performance by Pink), and Michael Bolton makes an appearance as well. At the height of his success, Conner's fans push themselves on him in intimately aggressive ways, leaving him bewildered as he reaches for the hand sanitizer. Meanwhile, one of Conner’s promotions causes a blackout, while another costs someone an eye; Conner releases an album with a cover photo that unintentionally resembles a Hitler rally; and sales figures plummet. When failure beckons during a concert tour, Conner is forced by his manager (Tim Meadows) to take on an opening act, the young and hip rapper Hunter the Hungry (Chris Redd), who soon outshines him.

The gags themselves, when they hit (and they do so more often than they miss), offer pinball-like pings of surprise. (But the depiction of Lawrence, who has become a rustic sad sack keeping his bitterness under tight constraint, withdrawn from his friends and from society at large, veers furthest from parody into caricature.) Nonetheless, the songs themselves are the center of the movie, because its very subject is the difference between a hit and a flop, and the Lonely Islanders’ variety of songs suggest their take on the subject: the difference is self-indulgence—in the positive sense. Conner flops when he worries about how he’ll be perceived and attempts, in his music, to influence it; he succeeds when he yields to his creative impulse, as crazy and idiosyncratic as it may be.

This sentimental notion is, unfortunately, unsubstantiated by the experience of many artists, whose success has been threatened by their most idiosyncratic work, particularly when it’s made on high budgets and (as a result) promoted as mass-market entertainments. Yet there’s a happy medium of mainstream performers whose freest strains of creation seem made for the media’s frame—artists who capture what is often misnamed the “public imagination” but is, in fact, an intersection of millions of private imaginations.

That’s the cheerful yet self-doubting story at the heart of “Popstar,” one that extends far beyond the comedy at hand and the specific pop astuteness and gets to the experience of the filmmakers themselves. Three people start doing what they do together because they’re friends and they love doing it; then it becomes their job; then it takes off. Suddenly, the suits are involved. They have meetings and pressures, advisers invited and uninvited, and with their success comes a public identity that threatens to run away from them, which brings publicists, a new layer of creation or subcreation involving not the art but the echo. The public personality intrudes on the relations within the trio, and some of the fun is gone. Meanwhile, the work itself risks shifting, and faces the threat of hackdom, of mediocrity, of the compromises and the complacencies, the calculations and the self-deceptions, on which popularity and celebrity depend.

Conner finds himself negotiating a second artistic crisis, between the old hits and his new creations. It’s a question as great in pop as in jazz (as when Miles Davis, plugging in and playing new work, inevitably disappointed audiences hoping to hear the great-American-songbook standards for which he had become famous). The inescapable sentimentality of the way Conner’s career crisis is resolved—a resolution that’s been more or less at the core of American comedy since the age of Billy Wilder, which is, in a word, “Be a mensch”—nonetheless leads to a sequence of a gleeful torrent of gibberish that’s among the most inspired recent comedic visions. If the songs in “Popstar” don’t quite reach the iconic quotability of Williams’s “Ishtar” ditties, they offer the additional enticements of elaborate music videos and concert stagings that bend the lyrics and their performance into another loopy dimension of astonishment.

Samberg may not be the most charismatic performer—he may not seem like the bright light who sharply outshines his longtime collaborators—but, performing with his own longtime collaborators Taccone and Schaffer, he plays the comedy with heart. For all its exaggerations and antics, the comedy about three collaborators and their tensions—even ones that are imagined—plays like it’s for real.